Poland Part 5

Thank you all for sticking with me as I keep posting these! We are now on the second week of our ministry in Radom: the English Workshop. It started on Monday morning with a placement test to determine which students should be in which class. I was one of the test administrators, and it was amazing to me to see how open and happy the students were right from the beginning. After that we got into our normal schedule for the workshop day, which is as follows. The team would get there between 8 and 8:15, and then we would have a prayer/devotional and planning time. The students would start arriving at 9:30. At 9:45, we started with a welcome and, three of the days, a short message from the pastor. Then it was off to English Reading Time, aka Bible Study. I led a group with Tim for this time, and this was the same group of students we were with later for Conversation Time. Everyday we would read a passage and then we had discussion questions about the passage. After this was English Class, and I taught a class with Greg. We taught level 6 out of 7, so our students were quite advanced. Conversation Time came next, and then we had large group time, where we played ice breaker games and such. Singing some worship songs ended out the day, and the students were dismissed at 2:30. The team collected our stuff, then walked to a restaurant about 15 minutes away for lunch. Our final destination of the night was the church. We invited the students there every night to play games and hang out. The following pictures are of all of that stuff and more, but it was just easier to explain most of it at the beginning. Rewind with me for just a minute here. Sunday before the workshop we ordered pizza for our team lunch and planning meeting. After some people were finished eating, they started getting out their computers to plan for the workshop, and Tim said, "Here's my laptop." It made me laugh.

Those of us staying at Bob and Vera's had a half hour bus ride into town everyday. Lee was such a fun guy.Once again, we took a picture of the empty bus so people wouldn't look at the funny Minnesotans who never ride buses.

This is the elementary school we rented for the workshop.

This is the coat hall. We had to change our shoes so that we weren't tracking in mud and slush, and our indoor shoes had to have light-colored soles so we wouldn't scuff up the floor.

The team room where we had our meetings and kept all our teaching materials. Our English Class Our plan of attack as teachers of such an advanced class was to teach them lots of hard words and have them write and speak using those words. At the end of the week, one girl in our class counted the new words we had taught them...147!L-R: Greg, Karolina, Agus, Paulina, Patrycja, Olga, Julie, Sara, Gosia, and Biska. Bartek was gone that day, but he's the guy in the other picture of our class at the far end of the table.Large group games we played.

Marek, the youth pastor from the church, leading us in singing. Playing Uno at the church in the evenings. Ping-pong was also popular at the church. There were a couple reasons we invited the students to the church. A few nights, we had someone share a testimony (there were also some testimonies at the workshop before we sang) or we would show a short video clip with a gospel message. We also wanted the students to be familiar with the church, so that they were more likely to come after the workshop was over. The biggest reason though, was so they could be in a place that was filled with the Holy Spirit, and have fun with other people in a clean, light environment, while they can witness Jesus being real in our lives. It was so cool to see the students open up and know that they were accepted, that they were welcome, and that they were loved.